


Translations

by alernun



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: !round 1 entry, F/M, Homophobia, Language, M/M, Reference to Rape, Self-Loathing, Sexual Content, Violence, discussion of the Holocaust, reference to abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:22:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/457993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alernun/pseuds/alernun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summer, 1949. When an old friend of Brian Xavier offers Charles an internship at his Israeli mental hospital, the young telepath is thrilled to be delivered from boredom and abuse. But a secret lurks within the sanatorium’s walls, and a chance meeting with a Jewish boy named Max will blow Charles’s new world wide open. (Makes reference to Magneto’s origin story as outlined in “Magneto:Testement” and other aspects of canon, but you don’t have to be a comic reader to understand the fic).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Wonderful art by lj user kotokto! Go here to see it, (as I am an AO3 virgin and have not worked out how to code it in).   
> http://kotokto.tumblr.com/post/27025950064/my-x-men-rbb-arts-based-on-alernuns-very

_**The Xavier Mansion- Saturday, June 21st, 1949-10:32 am** _

Dr. Steven Mason was not a nervous man. He'd trod barely-taken battlefields as a combat medic in Europe, stuffed a man's insides back into his gut more than once, and now that he had adopted psychiatrics in a desperate effort to treat the Unprecedented Victims, his life was currently a haze of buzzers, babbling, and brain science. He met all of these circumstances with the same British stoicism that had been his father's, (and his father's before him), only occasionally whispering the secrets of the fallout to the bottoms of his excess brandy glasses. Most of the time, he didn't even need the spirits; the good works were a tranquilizer on their own, when he had the time to register such perspectives as required one.

And so it was with some frustration that he acknowledged his nerves now. He wiped his sweaty palms on the trousers of his suit, and took a few necessary deep breaths before ringing his dead friend's doorbell. He supposed his apprehension could be put down to his long hiatus from the place. Back in the old days, the Oxford days, Brian Xavier had thrown numerous vacation parties here, and had graduated to business galas when the inevitable research grant had been awarded, the careers of his classmates all attained. Steven was the oldest of these old school friends, and had taken Brian's death rather hard...

_But not hard enough to do appropriate diligence._

Yes. Therein lay the second nagging reason for his discomfort, and there was no point in denying it: Steven was guilty. He'd been able to spot the looming dysfunction even at the funeral, where Sharon was far too unsteady on her feet and the boy...Charles, looked vacant and disturbingly grave for a toddler, not crying or fidgeting...just watching with a blankness that bespoke an utterly comprehending despair.

The wedding to a certain Mr. Marko had followed the funeral much too quickly for decency, but Steven attended anyway...only to find Sharon more unstable than ever and now attached to a man openly exhibiting numerous pre-psychotic red flags. Charles was still silent. Except for when you asked him about his bruises. Then, he would look at his new "family," and lie like someone with something at stake.

Hitler had eaten up many of his hours after that, Hitler and that terrifying war, so that today would mark the first time in over four years that he had stood upon this doorstep.

Perhaps an admission of nerves was forgivable, considering everything.

He rang the bell again.

"Ugh, hold your lunch down, I'm coming."

There was some heavy scuffling and a few impolite words, and then a large, rude-featured adolescent threw the solid wood door open as if it were aluminum, fixing him with a hostile glare. _Marko's boy._

"Good day, old chap." Mason hoped that pleasantness was contagious. "I wonder, is your mother home? I'm an old acquaintance of hers. You might recall meeting me a time or two -"

The boy cut him off with an ungainly sort of snort, but moved aside and stomped down the hall. "Name's Cain, not 'chap,' and I don't remember nuffin."

The doctor figured that this was as good a sign as any as he was going to be allowed to follow, and he did so, shutting the door behind him and trying not to be too rattled by the museum-like preservation of the house he'd known. They made a few meandering turns and almost took a flight of stairs, until Cain seemed to remember something and made a sharp turn-around, nearly treading on Steven's feet. Finally, just as the doctor was beginning to suspect a circular pattern to the lumbering boy's search, they stopped in a two-room parlor, and he was directed with a point of a stubby finger to sit down - before the boy began to holler.

"Mum! Some fancy man's here to see you. Better get two of whatever that is ready."

Steven heard a responding murmur, this time in a slurred feminine timbre, and then the clinking of crystal from the adjacent room. "Goodness, what a surprise, and with the house in this state. I knew I should’ve found the aspirin before…I have such'n awful headache, and your father’s friends will want to be entertained -"

Steven stood the moment he saw Brian's widow, not out of any old-fashioned courtesy but because he seriously suspected she was going to fall from the pedestal of too-high heels and end her life nose-deep in her glass. She braced herself against the wall at the last minute however, and made it to the opposite couch. Only then, secure and sagging against plush pillows, did she allow herself to recognize her guest.

The effect was instantaneous, and made Mason feel downright wretched. Sharon couldn't have been more mortified if he'd caught her stark naked.

"Steven! Doctor! Hello! This is a...I mean what are you...did you want one, then? A drink I mean? Or perhaps a sandwich - it was good of Cain to let you in for me. He’s so thoughtful…I run around like a chicken with my head cut off half the time, didn't even hear the doorbell -"

"I'm fine, Sharon." he said gently. In the early years, he'd disliked her. After her wedding to Marko, it had been more than that. But now, disheveled and panicked, half-way to drunk before noon, compulsively sipping and picking imaginary lint off her wrinkled skirt... now he could only pity her. "Nothing for me."

"Oh, nonsense. Tea then! You must have tea. Cain, go fetch Raven, tell her tea time. And find Charles-"

"I'm not in charge of that snot-nosed little fruit." Cain yelled, and the sound positively wilted his stepmother.

"A- all right, all right, just...tea. And I wish you wouldn't do that. I've got such a headache..."

More stomping and slamming left Steven to pick up the thread of stalled conversation. "I was in the area," he began. "On some business. I run a hospital now. In Israel. War vets and Holocaust survivors, mainly. We're really doing a lot of good; breaking ground... but trying to convince these trust fund psych graduates to pick up and move to a start-up country…well, let’s just say it’s a job that requires a full-on international business trip."

He paused as Sharon ran a shaky hand through a two or so day old curling iron job and blinked at him.

"Remarkable, though."

"Beg your pardon?"

"That you’ve come this far trying. Wonderful, really. Kurt is away too, I’m afraid. Some stock options issue, I never could keep it straight, not even when Brian was so…" she searched for the word, and he was strangely touched by her relief when she found it. "Patient."

"That's quite alright," Mason assured her. "I'm not here to see anyone in particular. I only wanted to check up, maybe take you and the boys to dinner...." 

It was peculiarly off-putting, the way she hadn't once looked him in the eye, and how she still didn't seem able to, even to meet the social niceties of a dinner invitation. If Mason had to guess, he would have said she was suffering from some sort of trauma...or alcohol withdrawal, but then, there was a drink, right there...

He really wondered whether or not there was something that could be done.

"Dinner." she parroted with a watery smile. "Yes, Charles would like that. He so rarely gets to -"

"YOU LITTLE BITCH! YOU KICKED ME!"

"I did not, Cain. Stop being such a drama queen and move, would you?"

"Do you know, you're just a servant. I could have you arrested-"

Sharon got up then, and called out past the door with a firm calm that could only have come from much practice. "Cain, we do _not_ speak like that in this house. And Raven –"

A younger female voice drowned out whatever she was going to say.

"That would mean admitting you got imaginarily kicked and wounded by a girl. Now what would all those fellas at your big private school think when THAT got out. They'd probably beat you up just as bad as you beat-"

"WHORE. I'LL KILL YOU!"

The violent exchange got closer and closer, Mason's back tensing more drastically with every abusive word Cain threw at the unseen girl, until all at once, she became very much seen when the pair exploded back into the parlor. There was a dull "thud" of flesh hitting flesh, and then a shriek as the girl - Raven, the maid - fell face first onto the oriental rug, only just preventing her chin from making catastrophic contact with the fallen tea china by rolling to the left - a move that took Cain down with her when his ankle connected with her wayward heel. 

This was fortunate for him, because Mason was yelling nearly as loud as they both were, about how it is never acceptable to hit a lady and how he should know better, and had actually moved to strike -

"Oh stop it just STOP IT the lot of you!" 

Sharon didn't yell so much as sob the imperative, and this shamed even her stepson into momentary silence. She seemed to deflate then, making no effort to hide her stress, embarrassment, and who knew what else? Mason sat down again, at a loss and still furious at this boy, who made no attempt to help Raven as she sniffled and rubbed her bruised collarbone. Finally, because he couldn't stand it anymore, 

"She should be seen to. And this one -" he jabbed a thumb at Cain, "should be kept in a kennel. Really, the liberties -"

Sharon took a deep breath, and pinched the bridge of her nose with a manicured hand before putting it up to silence him. "Cain, go to your room. Raven, come with me. Just a scuffle, that's all, a little misstep, we'll fix you up good as new in no time..."

Raven's glare couldn't quite mask her pain. "My lip is bleeding."

Brian’s widow set her glass down then, and wisely stepped out of her shoes before corralling the two children out of the parlor. 

"Make yourself at home, Doctor," she called over her shoulder. Steven wondered if she was aware of her own insincerity, or just didn't care. 

He certainly didn't. This _had_ been a bad idea. Mad, the Markos. Both of them. And what could he do? He didn't even have the power to detain the teenager. The whole visit had been an exercise in pointless sentimentality, and his own impotence just made him feel awful. For Brian. For his memory. For-

"Hello...don't feel sad. Raven will be alright. She provokes him on purpose sometimes, to get the evening off. Then she and I play checkers." 

Mason jumped as the new voice, accented and quiet, met his ears. He turned in his chair to locate the source, but saw no sign of the owner for a full thirty seconds...until at last a smallish boy in corduroy shorts and shirtsleeves climbed out from behind a drapery in the corner. His dark brown curls were a little mussed despite the preventatively close haircut, but one couldn't help but forgo notice of anything but his eyes. Large, shining and blue, fixed in unabashed contact with his audience and full of appraising intelligence. Brian Xavier's eyes. 

"Charles..." without fully knowing what he was about to do, Mason strode across the room and gave the child a long, rather inconsiderate hug. Inconsiderate, because the moment his arms wrapped around the slim shoulders, Charles flinched, and bore the gesture with a stiff sort of acquiescence. _What's been done to you, what have they done to you?_

"My dear boy, do you remember me?" he asked when he finally let go, and Charles nodded slightly before turning to clean up the tea pot shards by hand. 

"I do, sir. You were a great friend of my -- of the family."

Mason nodded, and almost asked Charles to stop the attempt at tidying...but on second thought it was clear the boy wanted something to occupy his hands. It calmed him, you could tell, in the way that blocks or Bertie, the stuffed office elephant, calmed the very small children during therapy hours in the hospital. 

Charles chuckled, and then stopped himself. Mason frowned at this, but decided more important inquiries were in order. "How are you doing, Charles? I do hope the sort of scene I just witnessed is a rare occurrence?"

At this, the boy's voice remained gentle, but had somehow gained a slight, indefinable scratch along the edge. "I think you suspect that it's not, sir. But as to your first, I'm doing fine." 

"I see..." Mason mumbled, shamed to the core. "And how old are you now? Ten? Eleven?"

"I'm thirteen," returned Charles, and began examining the flower pattern on the biggest shard of porcelain. 

"Thirteen. An exciting age! You'll be starting high school in September, yes?"

"Ah...I'm not in school, actually. Anymore."

Mason could not keep the alarm out of his tone. "My dear boy, whatever do you mean?"

Charles looked at him again, and shrugged sheepishly. "Well I...was skipped ahead so many times. By the teachers. I finished high school last year. It just...wasn't particularly difficult. I'm supposed to spend the summer looking into universities, but...it's the sort of thing you need assistance with." His jaw tensed then, and he gripped a piece of the teapot too hard for comfort. "And anyway, Mr. Marko says I'm not allowed." 

Mason leaned forward, and put a hand on Charles's shoulder. "Why not? Why wouldn't he -"

"There doesn't need to be a reason." Charles muttered. "You'd be surprised, Doctor, how few people have reasons, based in logic and fact, for what they do. No...there are other kinds of reasons."

Steven swallowed down the growing lump in his throat, and shook his head. "I wouldn't, Charles. I'm not. Surprised."

"Yes. Well. If you'll excuse me..."

He was withdrawing into himself now, like some exotic insect that had thought better of showing its flashing, colorful rage, and taken up the hated cocoon again, not for love but for safety. Mason, who had been hypnotized by his quiet composure the moment he'd revealed himself, couldn't bear to watch him hide away again. 

In fact, he couldn't bear the thought of him in this house for another minute. Circumstance had sullied what had once been a warm and happy place, and Charles Xavier was the insult to the injury. Charles Xavier was the only thing worth saving. 

"Do you want a job?" Mason blurted. 

Charles looked up, and raised a quizzical eyebrow. "I beg your pardon?" 

"I run a hospital in Israel. Do you know where that is?"

"Of course I do." 

Mason smiled. "Yes, of course you do. Well...I'm the hospital director. I have a degree in psychiatric theory."

For the first time, Charles looked excited. "Really? That's rather...I mean, that's fascinating! I'm very interested in brain science."

"Once again, I'm unsurprised."

Charles stood and stepped closer, eyes glinting with investigatory fervor and whatever fire fuels dearly held dreams. He dropped the last bit of porcelain. "At this hospital, do you examine confused people? And do you attempt to ascertain the prognoses of patients’ emotional states? Freud and Jung left us quite a few road maps for the identification process, didn't they, but I do hope you move beyond their fatalistic sort of diagnostics and have figured out ways to actually treat your charges?" 

Mason gave himself a moment to be astounded, and then remembered whose offspring this was. He felt a warmth creep out from the center of his chest, and knew that if there was such a thing as an afterlife, Brian was there now in his old leather wing back chair, laughing heartily behind a cloud of cigar smoke. 

"We do. We try. It's all very touch and go...they don't talk about it in the papers, but I'm sure a boy like you knows what sort of patients Israel attends. We're in the experimental phases, but I can personally attest to a great amount of good that's been done. If you came with me, you could be my personal clerk. The girl I started with ran off to get married and didn't have much of a vocation anyway, and I don't trust many people to be my walking agenda. You'd organize my paperwork, take notes in sessions, visit the convalescing, that sort of thing. It would do many of them a wonder, I think, to have a cheerful boy with his wits about him around. And of course I'd act as a reference for your university aspirations... what do you say?" 

Charles bit his lower lip in an attempt to discipline his uncontrollable grin...it was incongruous with the worry lines in his forehead. "I...yes. Yes, I would love to. Only...my mother. And Mr. Marko...he's away now but...when he comes back..."

His voice cracked, and then he clamped his mouth shut, and found something abruptly fascinating about the laces of his shoes. 

Mason huffed, and made his way to the second room to pour himself a large, fortifying scotch.  
"Oh, don't you worry about that, my boy. You're coming with me, and you're coming tomorrow. Your mother will be easy enough, and as for Kurt...well, have you ever seen shock therapy in action? I'll sic my technicians on him by post if I have to, and I never bluff." 

Charles laughed, musical and free with true appreciation and relief. It was a contagious sort of sound, and soon the parlor was filled with the alien chords of true happiness. 

"Oh wonderful," the boy returned. "I'll stay with you and help with Mother then. I've had two bags packed for ages." 

 

_**Tel Aviv, Israel-Thursday, June 26th, 9:17am** _

Charles curled around himself in the back seat of the IDF vehicle, and gave up on the scenery out the window. To be sure, there was plenty to see; already he was floored by the perpetually sunny Mediterranean temperature, the palm trees on every other corner, the colorful clothes of the Arab minority and the strange beards of some of their Jewish fellows...they were surrounded by water, too; you could smell it in everything. And the narrow sand streets were dusty with the bustling of thousands of lives, moving quickly and with purpose. 

Charles could have looked all day. Except that he couldn't. He was dreadfully tired. It had been an 11 hour flight and it was 2am back home, whereas Israel had just started its business hours. That, coupled with the pressing psychic miasma of the crowds, meant that he'd barely managed a wink for two days. 

He did a brief mental check of Dr. Mason in the front, to make sure the man didn’t expect conversation, but Steven was happily chatting with the driver in stilted, aural-acquired Yiddish, unaware (and uncaring) of his partner’s reluctance to participate in small talk. Charles almost reached out a tendril to quiet his benefactor, for the driver, Yitzhak, was preoccupied with thoughts of his ill son and hadn’t stopped wishing doom on Mason since he’d picked him up at the air base, but decided better of it. He was mostly successful now, in instances of control. But there had been a few…unfortunate incidents, and practice was not a thing to be attempted lightly. Instead, he pulled his vest over his head to block out the light, and drifted in a semi-doze to the crunch and rumble of the tires. His mind wandered. 

Raven. He missed her already. She had been the only thing anchoring him to reality these past few days, for it had seemed too good to be true; the offer, the intellectual stimulation …affection, and a means of escape. After they had convinced Sharon and endured a clipped, awkward conference call with Kurt (a call that would surely have consequences for Charles upon his return), he’d excused himself and then fairly bounded upstairs to Raven’s room. He had been the picture of composure amongst the adults, but the moment he saw her he burst into tears that had no expressible origin, and updated her in between huge gulps of air and nervous laughter. 

_"It’s to be for the whole summer. The whole summer, Raven! And Mason will help me with my applications and…do you see? I might…never have to return. We might at last be free."_

He’d expected jealousy. Sullenness, even anger. He’d come prepared to assuage her fears and promise her the world, for he was sure, if he focused, that he could set up mental barriers in all three of the Xavier mansion’s other residents, and make them forget her for the duration of his trip. He’d offered to do that off the bat when they’d met, but she’d refused, saying that whatever darkness the house held, they would face it together. 

That afternoon, he felt all that he’d anticipated, but it was at a low simmer in the very back of her mind. Much more prominent were her thoughts and feelings _for_ him, rather than about him. 

_"Are you sure? Where’s this joker been all your life, y’know? And do you really want to go to Israel? Isn’t there a war going on?!"_

_"Raven, I’ll be alright, Mason says his hospital is in the center of the nation’s securest city. Besides, I could get run over by a bus tomorrow -"_

_"No you couldn’t. We barely leave the grounds."_

_"You know what I’m getting at."_

_"Don’t take this the wrong way, but what are you going to do without me there? Who’s gonna take care of you if you get punched in the psychic stomach by people’s thoughts, like on field day? You think Mason? Anyone can see that guy’s uh…job-focused, and I’m betting he only took you in because he knew your father -"_

_"It wasn’t just that."_

(Charles winced drowsily at this recollection…he could be downright snappish when defensive). 

" _Raven, he could see that I was up to the work. And I am. I will be. Even if I’m on my own most of the time I’ll…be alright. I have to perfect blocking sometime, and if I have to do it there, I’ll have no choice but to do it well."_

He hadn’t voiced his other more desperate reason for accepting the position, and that was that anything, even dying like a dog in the street from a psychic stroke or someone else’s suicide, was better than another day of Cain’s beatings or Kurt’s more…diversified handling. 

Still. She had known. She was the only one who truly did, and probably ever would. And so she had wiped his tears, and taken his hand in a stronger grip than any twelve year old girl had a right to. 

_"You’re right, you won’t have a choice. But maybe…you’re right too, about that being a good thing. Just promise me you’ll be careful. Oh and, you’re not making me invisible. We’re all each other's got, whatever this doctor tells you. I have to look out for what I got, especially when Kurt comes home and starts wooing Sharon for your bank codes."_

 

He awoke an hour later to the sound of metal on metal, and Mason's cold, dry hand on his forehead. 

"Ah, good. You were mumbling and fidgeting so much back there I thought you might be feverish, but all's well it seems. Come on then, Yitzhak's already taken in most of the luggage."

Charles smiled and exited the van, squinting in order to get his bearings. They were in a large parking circle almost filled with vans like the one that had brought them here, just inside the boarders of an imposing security fence. In contrast to the brick and whitewashed buildings on the outside, the complex within the fence was charmless and concrete. Each structure stood squat, functional and almost tooth-like, so that, as Mason led them down a short avenue peppered with guards towards a medium-sized bicuspid, he fought the childish urge to reach for someone's hand. 

"Are we in some sort of military base?"

Mason nodded and typed an elaborate key code into the bicuspid's door. "After a fashion, yes. This is HaKirya, the government district. The British embassy is just there, (Charles turned his head vaguely in the direction of the indicated molar), and originally they wanted to give me the basement. But I fought parliament and pleaded with the Knesset for this space. I call it Sholem, which means-"

"Peace. In Yiddish." 

"Right. That's quite right! Have you studied?"

Charles bit his lip and shrugged. Bad habit that; he needed to remember not to jump the gun, and think before he spoke other people's thoughts. "A bit. For...a project."

"Marvelous! Well, we're in Ward A now, which is where I do most of my work, and where you'll be staying. Follow me."

He did so, and was led with harried speed through a maze of shining white hallways that were more or less what he'd always imagined. Raven hated the idea of hospitals. He really couldn't blame her; she'd almost met her death within them - more than once, and he had been no mere spectator of them himself over the years. But the pain within these walls (and yes, it was here...pulsing and vein-like throughout the very plaster)...well. It was nothing compared to the notion of medical minds coming together and sharing knowledge, making strides...doing good. Charles thrilled to the idea that he would soon be joining them, even if just in a clerical sense. Charles was patient. He knew this was the first step...and the pain he sensed only meant they had their work cut out for them. 

"Ah, here we are." Mason side-stepped a very overworked nurse and then used a clunky key to open a narrow door on the right hand side of the suite-style corridor. "These were Miriam's old apartments. She was a dignitary's daughter, so we made sure to keep her very comfortable. You have your own bathroom and even a little stove in there. I think it used to be a break room. We can’t put patients in here because of all the glass. It's nice that the view won't go to waste."

Charles surveyed the apartment with barely concealed glee. It was small and downright Spartan compared to the mansion, but it was _his._ Mason had just handed him the key, and he ran his thumb along its edge...there were no locks at home. None that he controlled, anyway. 

That and...

He didn't realize he'd been walking towards the glass doors until his nose nearly touched them. When he came back to himself he simply stared at the courtyard beyond, and the large cypress tree that was its centerpiece. A few patients wandered around with their aides in a sort of placid stupor, and he felt a certain kinship with their contentment, albeit of a different origin. 

He couldn't see the fence from here. Only summertime.

"Can I really use these doors? And that building there, is it connected? That looks like a breezeway to the right..."

Mason nodded and showed that the doorknobs yielded. "Free for your use, boy, absolutely. Just don't forget to lock them behind you. And that's B Ward. Also part of our facility, just, ah, more of an annex. Don't you worry, though. We've got plenty to keep you busy here! I'll wager you're still tired from all the traveling, so take the rest of the day off to get settled. There's a mess one floor down, but if you want to do your own shopping and explore a little bit, make sure to visit the concierge and get your clearance card. One of the on-call orderlies should be able to guide you. I'm afraid I have to run, but I'll see you in my office bright and early at 9 tomorrow, yes?"

Charles tore himself away from the window and began surveying his luggage. "Yes. I'll manage, thanks so much. See you tomorrow."

 

He made sure to draw the blinds before passing the next few hours. First, he took a sprawling, half-naked and horribly undignified nap on the generously large bed. Then he showered and put on some of his lightest clothes before meticulously unpacking everything he'd brought. Making the space his own calmed him, and distracted him from the psychic pressure beyond every visible boundary. By the time he'd tacked his one and only poster on the opposite wall (a movie advertisement for Key Largo), it was early evening, and the sunset made the grass burn brilliant green. 

He could have walked right out, of that he was sure. Rested and relaxed, he was confident in his abilities of mental persuasion, and didn't particularly relish the idea of a babysitter following him around the city, especially one who could be of more use helping patients. In the end, he tested his confidence and convinced the guard to open the gate again with unquestioning benevolence, although he did pick up his key card, as it seemed a useful thing. 

With slow, measured progress and deep breaths, Charles walked a few blocks amongst the thinning crowds until the street opened up into a market square. He paused on the outskirts of the makeshift commerce center and did what he always did when about to indulge extraversion. He imagined his mind, a city of lights and fertile circuits, a nova of electrical power and ionic flux. He had seen many minds, but he thought privately that his was rather extraordinary. 

Once he had formed the picture, he imposed his agency upon it, and constructed a wall. The wall was blue and brilliant, blinding like neon fire and encompassing every frenetic byway of his intellect in a flawless compilation. He watched as a spike in activity at his cerebral cortex penetrated the boundary - light touching light, and then he allowed the part of himself that heard and understood thought to release. 

For a moment, it was cacophony. Tel Aviv's populace screamed inside his head, and battered light with title waves of sound, sound, and more sound, shaking and rippling the neon...and then the wall expanded, and glowed comet bright, and gradually, the voices died to whispers. 

He could get out. But they could not come in, unless invited. 

"I did it, Raven!" he said to the air, hoping madly that she could hear him, yearning for her lopsided grin of congratulations and a backhanded compliment to match. He didn't have long to reminisce. 

"Hey, pretty David, come see what I sell! You look like a tea drinker, David, or maybe it is luck talismen you need, for all those giants you will fight."

 

Later, when a black sky boasted a king's ransom of stars, Charles took a cup of recently haggled-for darjeeling and a package of dried apricots under the cypress tree, and drifted through other people's dreams. 

He avoided nightmares out of habit. 

And so he did not see the mad girl, wandering through a fog of her own misery's conjuring, clutching the congealed mass of half-formed flesh and dead blood that had once been the child inside her womb. He fell asleep like that, outdoors and mere yards away from her chronic torment, and didn't hear the desperate plans and answering pain of the man who loved her, who told her so, again and again, despite the fact that she no longer comprehended.


	2. Chapter 2

_**Two Weeks Later...** _

The wake-up call was ten minutes early that morning, but Charles answered the operator cheerfully, already up and ready. He really should have made an effort to eat sociably in the mess hall, but Dr. Mason had recently given him the task of organizing and cataloging all of Ward A's patient profiles, and the work enticed him more than any office cameraderie. (That and, Mason was in the minority in terms of treating him like an adult. If one more nurse commented on what a bright boy he was, or worse, asked him which elementary school he attended, he’d force them all to act the age they guessed him to be and not feel a moment’s regret). Thus the plan was to make some coffee and pour over the "E’s" while making comparative notes to Mason’s as-yet unpublished diagnostics manual on his typewriter. This was not, strictly speaking, part of his job, but when he’d presented A through D with annotated commentary, the doctor had ruffled his hair and exclaimed loudly that his work was more careful than some of his residency assistants’. Yes, Charles wanted to start on E very soon -

But then the phone rang again, and he was forced to pick it up mid paper-load. 

"Yes?"

"Charles, this is Mason, please make your way down to Room 12A - that’s in the basement. And bring all your things. We have an emerging situation that requires careful attention, and I think it’ll be good for you to observe." 

"Er…alright. Be down in a moment!"

When he emerged from his apartments, heavy Electromatic in hand, he was almost knocked to the ground by a rushing trio of maintenance staff. He followed them as they headed for the stairs, and noted with rising apprehension that, though the siren seemed to have been disabled, the red hazard lights were blinking throughout every hallway. When he arrived in the basement, he was grateful that he was not a cowardly child, because this slow strobe was the only illumination for several twists and turns, until at last the doors began sporting "A" suffixes, and he could see Mason and a few colleagues settling down in a gloomy conference room. 

He joined them silently, glad for the fly-on-the-wall status, and finished loading his paper as Mason addressed what appeared to be two robust orderlies, a nurse, and a partnering doctor of Semitic descent. One of the orderlies was holding a wet washcloth to a substantial gash over his right eye. _Quite the entourage…_

"Good morning, everyone. I was informed an hour ago by nurse Schriebman (he pointed to the sole female in the room, a small, frightened-looking woman with delicate features and incredible posture), that we have apprehended a pair of intruders. Margot, why don’t you tell us what happened, from the beginning."

The nurse stepped forward slightly and squared her shoulders before addressing the room in broken but understandable English. "I was in pharmacy annex. Making records. Taking inventory for day. It was strange from beginning because lights were off. Lights always on, for safety, and lights off. Then I filling the bin and I hear noise over vent fan. Some sort of moaning, high sound, very strange. I go to it, and it come from storage closet. I was very afraid, so I take old desk lamp off shelf and open the door…I only had moment to see girl crouched there. Young, very thin, with a colored scarf around her head like a gypsy - she was the maker of the noise. She was crying. She stopped and squinted at the light when I opened the door, froze at sight of me…and then the man, the one who hurt Jairan, he push me hard into closet so that I fall against other side, and yanked girl out as I fall in. H-he try to lock the door on me, to get away, I think, and keep me from following, but I had screamed when he pushed me, and Jairan and Yossi come to help -"

The orderly with the gash nodded and took over. "Thank God we were on stock duty. We barely heard her, these walls are so thick, but there is only one door to the pharmacy and no exits in that hallway - we surprised them just as they were leaving. I tell you, me and Yos expected the fight _he_ gave us; he’s a skinny scarecrow but has training, Mossad training, I’d bet my life on it. We both were so focused on him we didn’t even see her coming with her nails until she got me - shrieking and cursing us in Yiddish and God knows what else like a wild animal- "don’t touch him don’t touch him" and "Max, Max, Max," over and over again…" 

Charles shivered as Jairan trailed off. His psychic energy read nothing but deep unsettlement, with a mixture of sympathy, anger, and guilt…but guilt for what? He was about to go deeper, but then Mason spoke again, and broke his concentration.

"And where are the pair now?"

"Well, the girl was absolutely wild, we had to restrain her. She’s in B Ward…I’m sorry but we just didn’t think she’d hold up to an interview. She wasn’t making any sense…I gave her some morphine. As for the man…well, boy really...he’s in 12, like you said. I sedated him as well, but he’s conscious…he’s handcuffed too, but trust me. That’s a good thing. I don’t know if he’ll talk to you… he stonewalled us, and he’s got the numbers tattoo." 

Mason frowned. "And what does he speak? Has he spoken at all?" 

Jairan nodded. "Yeah…I think it was German. I don’t speak German, Doc. I’m pretty sure no one on call today does. I could maybe get one of the patients…? Or see if IDF can lend one of their interpreters."

The doctor shook his head gruffly. "No no, last thing we need are some defense force hawks brow beating our every move, at least not until we figure out who he is and what he came here for. And it should be someone on the payroll…damn, I’m not fluent. Never was, and we need fluency for this sort of -"

"I am." Charles blurted, then turned a little pink. _Well, I am! Just not in the actual words._

Everyone was staring at him now, as if they’d just noticed he was there. He wished for a moment that he could hide behind his typewriter, but seeing as that was impossible, he folded his hands and waited for the inquiry. 

"First Yiddish, now German…Charles you’re either more brilliant than I at first inferred, or you’re an excellent bluff. Let me just say that this would not be the time to show off, or be untruthful-"

Charles, who had been carding through the language centers of everyone in the room and compiling what amounted to a lexicon of intermediate-level, very badly accented German, blinked calmly and tried to imagine how Marlene Dietrich would sound if she were indignant. Then he replied. 

" _I am aware, Doctor. I am also up to the task."_

Margot smiled and looked about ready to clap her hands in surprised glee. Yossi thought privately (except not so privately, thanks to his rather loud frequency), that Charles was a little weird, and probably queer, but at least he was intelligent. Mason however, was a warm, glowing combination of impressed, delighted, and relieved. 

_/A miracle, this boy. We might yet escape a press circus./_

Charles very consciously did not beam. " _So do I have the job? I’m not afraid."_ He said this in the tongue in question as well, easily side-stepping words none of them knew and keeping it short and confident in the diction. 

Mason was already standing. "Absolutely. Give the typewriter to Margot, and make sure to set a slow, even pace in the translation. I’m sure you know that embellishment is forbidden-"

"Of course."

"And I’ll have Jairan get a tape recorder, just in case the stenography misses an exchange."

Charles followed the doctor down the hall, heart pounding with exhilaration and a little fear. He had no idea what to expect really…but it was as if the mind behind the door to 12A exerted some invisible force upon him, and he had the strong impression that to ignore this force would be utter madness. 

Charles was not used to strong feelings. Up until recently, he hadn’t allowed himself to feel much of anything. No; Charles was much better at falling into the feelings of others. 

He walked through the door. 

xxx xxx xxx

One exit. Locked. No windows. Basement. Stone - not metal. There is not enough metal, never enough. Never enough to help me. It’s on my wrists and it is not enough. I am tired - I shouldn’t be tired. They shot me with something. They shot her with something -

Stupid girl. Should have stayed quiet, should have trusted me-

Where is she? Where is Magda-my Magda-Roma-liebe-Magda- _Magda._ Please please let her be ok. 

She will never be ok, will she? 

Auschwitz. Poland. Even Israel, this ‘modern promised land.’ It is all a mass grave. 

No - I can’t think this way. Can’t fail her. She may never be okay, but she isn’t dead. 

Neither is that orderly. It’s probably good. But when he put his hands on her -

He should not be breathing. 

The mirror is double-sided. Any idiot could tell. I don’t know why they bother. 

There are one-two-three…four wristwatches ticking on the other side, next to one another, one half a foot lower to the ground than the other three. There is also a silver pen, and more concentrated iron content higher up on one of the males. 

So the orderly is bleeding. He has brought his friend. That nurse stuck around, and they’ve called for a wealthy man. 

I just need to get out. I’m sure I could run faster. I could finish the job she started on his eye if I had to. But every time I move, my head spins, and my legs feel weaker than foil -

The door is opening, and there’s not a damned thing I can do. 

White coat. Moustache. Leather shoes - doctor. He’s slight and has a sharp, patrician face. He looks a little like -

Never mind. 

I don’t like doctors.

I expect Pen, or maybe Nurse, but neither comes with him. Instead...

I laugh. I put all my hate into this laugh, because a boy who looks like a girl is standing in front of me. 4 feet tall if he's an inch in ankle socks someone must have picked out for him and a fucking sweater vest - in July. He's staring right at me, unblinking with lamp-like eyes, and this...

My handcuffs shake. 

_Stop fucking staring at me._

"I'm sorry." the boy says...and he says it in perfect German. Christ...I think he's blushing. 

Are they going to shoot him in the head if I don't talk?

I prepare myself for this eventuality, and become unreadable. 

"I'm Charles. This is Doctor Mason. We aren't here to hurt you."

This is clever of them. It really is. I had meant to stay silent, study the angles, and wait for my opportunity to escape. The most important rule about being a prisoner is you have to know in your heart that they will never let you out. If you know that, your captor has no leverage, and you've become desperate. 

I knew a girl once who hid in a pile of corpses for two days, because I told her it was necessary. 

Desperate people get things done. 

"You couldn't hurt me if you tried, child." I say this, and break my own rules, because I can't help it. His presence is insulting. It makes no sense. He's in a fucking lab basement dressed like my grandfather, speaking a language he has no cause to have learned - accented, only slightly, but accented. My turnkey is a British schoolboy. 

He translates what I've said into English (I know the sounds, but only a few words), and the doctor frowns, thin eyebrows nearly touching as he studies me at some length. He makes a long gruff speech that the boy - Charles, listens carefully to, and then he's speaking German again. 

"My colleague wants to remind you that the only ones who have perpetrated any injuring this morning are you and your accomplice. He says that this is a sanatorium sponsored by the Israeli government, and that breaking and entering is a very serious crime, especially since it appears you were after narcotics -"

"I wasn't trying to get high." I say through gritted teeth. 

Charles translates, and Mason barks something back, but I can tell the boy barely hears. He's studying me in that way again, as if he can see _through_ me. I don't like it. I want to fold my arms across my chest, kick him in the solar plexus, and then throw - not him, no...the doctor, through that farce of a window. Eventually, he replies. 

"Look I know you're angry and have absolutely no respect for me, and I don't really...I mean I don't mind, obviously this conversation is at the bottom of your priority list. But here's the deal. You got caught, doing whatever you were doing. And your friend, the girl...she's in custody. She's very disturbed -"

"Don't you dare. Don't you even _think_ you can - You have _no idea_ what she's been through."

"You're right, I don't."

The doctor taps Charles on the shoulder, but the boy puts his hand up and never looks away from me...a request, (or a demand?) for no interruptions. To my surprise, the older, white-coated, stern looking man relents. Well, there is a certain authority about the kid. For one thing, he's the only egg head they could drum up, in a country full of Ashkenazi Jews, who can speak my language. 

"Max, I _don't_ know, all right? I'm not claiming to. I'm trying to explain the situation. She's in custody somewhere, and all we have at this point to speak to her character is an orderly with a head wound. And you. We haven't called the authorities. You're not alone in your mistrust of the authorities, it would seem. That means that what happens to you depends entirely on what is said to me and Mason, right here in this room. Do you understand? She needs you, Max. She needs you to explain, so that we don't have to go by appearances." 

Verdamnt. No. No no no. Stop talking. 

I just want Magda. I want to pull her out of the corpses - the living corpses now, of this place, this place for crazy people who have no families. I am Magda's family, and I am nothing, no one. I am only Max, but I will never leave her. I walked the ten miles in the tracks of Soviet tanks to the town with the name neither of us could pronounce, with her. On my back, or in my arms, or walking on swollen ankles beside me. I found the only rabbi. I followed the sabbath candlelight to a basement of other cobbled together survivors, all holding hands. Strangers, made brothers and sisters forever by the six points of a patchwork star. I prayed for her sake, hollow words under a piece of ruined white lace given by a widow who had lost everything. I broke the bowl under my feet, even though there were holes in my boots. I made the rabbi make me husband, and Magda wife. 

I made the child that is dead now, and killing her. 

I did it all.

A small white hand breaks up the wood on the table. Its fingers are indistinct and blurry, but I can see that it's holding a handkerchief. Sky blue with a monogram, CX, except the right side of the X looks larger because of the drip. Drip. Drip. 

I take Charles's handkerchief awkwardly with both manacled hands, and wipe my eyes. I used to resist tears. The logical assumption is that tears are a visible sign of weakness, and give your enemy satisfaction. 

It only took me a few months to learn that nothing made a difference. Hell, it's better to cry. Silently, and grit your teeth until it's over, because crying is better than screaming – or begging. I am not ashamed of my tears. 

I don't want to think anymore though. I hate this room. I hate that I can't focus. 

"Please, Max." The boy is talking again. "Just answer Doctor Mason's questions. We're taping this, and when we're done, we'll give you a copy." 

I wonder what power exactly backs that promise. He looks a little wild, like he's making it up as he goes along. But sincere too. Whatever the doctor's game, this child seems genuinely moved. How touching. 

"Really, there's no harm in that, they'll let that happen, Max, I swear. That way, if you want, you can....well, aren't your people going about the business of remembering? Remembering is important...all too easily, people forget as a defense. Even now, people are denying that it ever even happened. I didn't learn about it in school, and yes, school's rather fresh in my memory. People forget because it's just too horrible...but what happened to you...to the girl, is indefensible. Don't let them get away with it, Max. Don't let them take Magda away." 

My head snaps up in alarm. He's babbling quickly to Mason again, who is nodding. I don't care. Something else has sent the hairs at the back of my neck on end. 

"I never told you her name." 

He goes pale then, but the doctor cuts off any reply he planned on making. They have a short exchange, and then Charles begins asking his questions. I am going to answer them. Because tactically, he's right. This is my best chance of leaving this room. If anything, it will buy me time until I can think of...something. Anything. 

"What is your full name?"

"Max Eisenhardt." 

"How old are you?"

"Eighteen."

"Where are you from?"

"Dusseldorf, Germany. So is Magda. We live in Poland now."

I am glad for the time it takes to interpret my answers. It gives me breathing space and an opportunity to watch his body language. To keep tabs on the people outside. There are more now. Europeans really need to stop using metal eyelets in their shoes. 

"Why Poland?" he asks, and I'm back to thinking he's the stupidest child that has ever profaned the planet. 

"Because they didn't give us bus fare when they liberated Auschwitz. And Magda is Roma, and Krakow has a good sized Roma slum." 

Charles winces. Good. The Herr Doktor is barking in his ear again, but he never takes his eyes off me. 

"How long...were you a prisoner there? What happened to you?" 

Bile rises in my throat. I resist the urge to spit it at them. Instead, I swallow it down, and grin in that way that Magda says makes her afraid sometimes. "I was a Sonderkommando for two years. Do you know what that is, little boy?" 

"No. But Mason has just told me that... that you were responsible for running the furnaces."

"Oh no, not running. Jews don't run things, child. For cleaning. For separating the pyramids of bodies, and shoveling them into the fire, like coal. You get good at it after a while. Efficient. Tell me, boy, what do you think burns faster? A mother holding her child, or an elderly man on the same pallet as a woman?"

I want to repulse them. I want to make them sick. It's only fair to spread the sickness. Mason goes a little green when it's translated. Charles just shakes his head, and slides his hand across the table. His fingers graze the top of my wrist - and then he draws back, as if singed or embarrassed. 

"I imagine nothing burned quick enough. I imagine you remember every face."

"You..." The metal is rattling. Breaking. "You shut the fuck -"

"Mason says they killed Sonderkommando every two or three months on average, to keep the secret of what was going on. He wants to know why you were spared for so long."

It's not like I wasn't expecting this. Clearly this do-gooder Englishman has done some research. But it doesn’t make it any easier. 

"I was...of some interest. At the Birkenau facility." 

More babbling. For the first time, Mason looks shocked. I get a once over as he tries to assess the physical damage, but apart from the fact that I’m a little bony, all of my scars are covered. Black trousers. White linen shirt. Suspenders. Heavy boots. I had a cap but lost it. 

When I was younger, I wore a purple vest, even. Can't imagine what I was thinking. 

I wish I had it now, for the extra assurance. These civilians don't get to see my scars. 

"And what did the surgeons...." Charles falters, and pinches the bridge of his nose for a moment; a curious gesture for someone so young. "What did they want with you?"

Obviously I can't tell them about my perversion. That's what I've come to think of it as. Not a gift, like my uncle Erich used to half-think, or something that makes me powerful. If I had power, I wouldn't be here. 

If what I can do were good, Reichmark coins, barbed wire, guns, saws, tank engines - _death,_ would not come alive in my hands, and my mother would not be dead. 

I am metal. I am a monster. And so I choose to be no one. 

Nothing. 

I am Max. 

"They thought I had ESP," I lie easily. "The German army didn't want to do the hard work of finding the allies on their own, and I had a knack for swindling the bloc kommandos. Cards, dice, that sort of thing. They would play me for the fillings in my teeth, because if they extracted them themselves, they could keep the gold, instead of handing it over to the higher SS. Klaus Schmidt found them out, and I was his special project after that." 

It's all true. Only cards was how I got my bread, not my wounds. And Schmidt...Schmidt had me from the beginning. 

Charles swallows hard after translating, and looks like he could use some water. Mason murmurs something and appears deep in thought. I know that he's really the one interrogating me, but for some reason all I can center on is the boy...why is he here, within range of all this horror? Why didn't someone brush his hair this morning? 

"Klaus Schmidt...Mason wants to know if that is, as he puts it, _the_ Schmidt. The Butcher of Birkenau's colleague?"

"Why? Does he know him? Tell him I'm sorry I don't have a forwarding address."

They have no idea how sorry. 

To my surprise, Charles chuckles. It's a mirthless sound, and again the gesture of a much older person. 

"Yeah I don't think I will, if it's all the same to you. He also asked me to ask you to elaborate on the experiments, as you're the first survivor of this sort he's encountered-"

_"A little coin is nothing to a large iron gate."_

_"Alles est gute. Alles est gute."_

_"Now this is 1,000 volts, Max. Let me see you move the tram. And don't worry, this will probably cause some memory loss. So though I can't promise it will be painless, you probably won’t remember it."_

_"...Is this an order, Sir?"_

_"Am I your superior, and are you my lieutenant?"_

_"Well yes but...even with vermin, maybe especially with vermin, it's a sin. I'm not even sure if I'll be able to -"_

_"You know what's a sin, Horst? The cabaret dancer you go on leave to see every Christmas. What's his name? Karl? I'm sure Karl would love to come join you here on a more permanent basis."_

_"...Okay. Okay, I'll do it, but...but I'm going to knock him out. I heard what happened to the others."_

_"No, you will not knock him out, you will do it right here, while he's strapped to the table, and he will be awake to make the ceiling tiles move. That's the whole point, you know. Anger, and pain. And you can't feel pain, if you can't feel anything."_

"No." 

I can't stop shaking my head. 

I can't stop shaking. 

Charles bites his lip, and says it in English, and Mason, for once, says nothing at all. For enough time. For enough time, there's nothing. Then...

"Who is she?"

Even now, thinking about her soothes me. I wonder if this is what they mean, when they say women bring out the best in men. Then again, "They" and "I" don't have anything in common. 

"She's my wife. She was in the gypsy camp. I knew her a little before that, but...you learn who people are, in a place like that. Learn who you are. I didn't need to know anymore afterwards. Only that she survived, and she needed me - still needs me." My voice begins to waver, and I hate it. But I go on, because they have to, have to listen. For her sake, not mine. "She's not crazy. The orderly grabbed me - the last time she saw that happen, she had to watch the SS beat me half to death -"

Mason snorts skeptically and babbles his trite little language, and I want to murder him. Charles, to his credit, looks bemused as he translates. 

"My colleague would like to remind you that you're not in Auschwitz now, and that if she really is sane, she should understand the difference."

I can hear my back teeth grinding together. And then all I can feel is my heart pounding, and the bolts in the handcuffs making their way out of the casings. Rage. And pain. My old friends. 

Come on now, old friends. Do your work on my nervous system. Sober me up.

Make me deadly again. 

"You can tell the doctor," I say very calmly, "that if he were a real doctor, then he would know that's not how it worked. Tell him that Magda never got shot, or beaten, or even raped - my bribes were too good for that. But there is no safety in Auschwitz. No haven. She worked in the Birkenau infirmary. That means day after day, she was given Schmidt's used-up experiments. Ask the doctor if he's ever had to try to re-attach the eyeball of a four year old child as that child went into shock. Ask him if he was ever forced to share a 2 by 4 foot cell with consumption patients for 24 hours, to see if ‘the gypsy constitution, much like the rat, could withstand infection.’" 

I'm talking too much. More than I have in ages - about any of this. But it is necessary. 

The third screw has just fallen silently onto my pants leg. 

"Ask him to imagine slowly starving to death on top of it all, and then, just as you were thinking you'd go to sleep on the electrified fence, you see the boy who courted you in school on the other side of it, throwing bodies like sacks of grain onto a cart and still, _still_. He is unable to see anything but you."

Charles...for a second of utter shock, the metal stops moving. Because the boy is weeping. And yet...not like a child would weep. These are stalwart, straight-backed tears. Eye-contact tears. If I wasn't suspicious of everything, I would say these were tears of true sorrow. "I'm not going to tell him." He says, and ignores Mason's prompting. "I'm not going to repeat what I have no right to."

My heart drops like a stone. It's time to finish this. I want to go back to a more predictable misery. But I need more time. And so they need the end of the story. 

"You should be careful, Charles." I lean forward, into his space, liking the way his Adam's apple juts up and down with discomfort. "You'll lose your little job if you keep ignoring your superiors. Go on, tell him. Then tell him that she never really recovered. I don't know why. Sometimes I wish the Nazis _had_ figured genes out...what makes one person wither, and another person heal? She can't eat. She can't sleep. Almost 4 years it's been, and she's like a little mouse. Even her happiness is fragile. So when she got pregnant I thought 'Finally. Finally it will change.’ Because Magda...she is meant to be a mother. There is only one thing stronger than her fear, and that is her capacity to love."

Babbling. Babbling. Babbling. No more handcuffs. I am still, like rock. The boy rests his head in his hand. 

"She is pregnant?"

"No." Inch the chair forward. Slowly. Count the eyelets and the watches and the locks on the doors. Less. The Aryan language, it seems, holds no charm for those who don't understand it. Their boredom will be my ticket out of here. "It died. That's what happens when your body still thinks you live in the camps. It breeds death, and that's that. She was devastated. It was violent, and very painful. I took her to Israel, to see if sun and faith would help her. But she is haunted by the baby's ghost. That's what she tells me. It follows her. I was in the pharmacy because I wanted to find tranquilizers. She came along because she won't leave me. S-she...she just needs sleep. She needs to eat something. She'll be better when she can think again." 

More English. I test my legs on the floor. They'll hold me now. I know they will. And I'll have the element of surprise. The doctor is an imbecile. And the boy is too soft to see danger. He's been touched by my story, so unlike his grimmest of faerie tales, and I think he's a little overwhelmed. They suspect nothing. 

"You're wrong," Charles says forcefully, and it makes me jump a little. 

"What?"

"...Mason says you're wrong. He says Magda is exhibiting all the signs of post-traumatic hysteria, and that only long-term therapy is going to help her. She probably also needs vitamins, if her intake is as little as you say. A miscarriage is very hard on the body, and if she continues as she is, it's only going to get worse."

"Oh?" 

It's all I can think to say. It's all I can manage. 

"Yes," Charles pleads. He's translating in tandem now; listening and speaking at the same time. His mind must be very quick, to manage that. "Look, he's not going to press charges. You can go. But she should stay here. This is a good place! And you'll get to visit her and the doctors will help her, and if you don't have any money the Knesset's given a grant, half the committed patients are survivors...she could get better here." 

I smile. I reach out, and tuck his most offending cowlick behind his ear. (To his credit, he doesn't flinch, although I can tell by the tension in his shoulders that he wanted to). I leave my hand on his head. His hair is soft. 

"She probably could, child." I say. 

And then I kick over the table, and let the handcuffs fall apart, and put him in a headlock no SS officer has managed to break. This happens in the time it takes for Mason to blink twice and stand up - but that is all he gets to do, before the leg not holding Charles against me comes up and kicks him square in the chest. 

I hear his head hit the wall, and he doesn't move again. I'm not sure he'll breathe again. 

The alarm is still disabled. I had the foresight for that, at least. Now it's just a matter of catching all those panicking watch springs, ticking for tear life outside the door. 

"But she won't. She's had enough of walls, and bars, and Mason's kind." He whimpers, but doesn't resist when I sling him over my shoulder. "And she belongs with me. Now, if you know what's good for you, you're going to help me find her. You're going to get us out, do you hear?"

I can feel his pulse against my shoulder blade, humming-bird quick and stuttered. It's pure fear-which is why I don't anticipate the bite, hard and blood-drawing at the small of my back. It puts me off balance as I shove a fist through the mirror in an attempt to arm myself with glass and hostage before taking on the fools outside. 

I put him down, but keep hold of his collar. I could kill him for it, but he looks like he could do the same, and this intrigues me. 

"I do hear you, yes." He answers, words dripping acid. My instinct says this hatred is not for me. It's some other thing in him, locked up 24/7 behind Bambi eyes and the illusion of a childhood. Hm. "I'll even help you willingly, since you'll just make a mess of it and bulldoze through innocent people on your own. But if you touch me in anger again, I'll find a way to end you. I'll claw through your carotid artery with my bare hands and watch you bleed, and leave Magda wherever they have her. Do _you_ hear, Max? Do _you_ understand?" 

I do. Mein Gott...I do. 

I let go. He stays put. We are allies.


	3. Chapter 3

Charles Xavier had gone mad in under an hour. 

At least, that was how it felt. From the moment he laid eyes on this strange, intense intruder, he had fought a mental battle on three fronts. The first was, obviously, the translation, and the second was keeping up his professionalism towards his mentor. 

Mason…Christ, Mason, deteriorating minute by minute on the hard concrete floor….he checked his electrical patterns again. Knocked out, not dead…just knocked out. But dimmed, certainly. And he could do nothing. Nothing except resolve this situation as quickly as possible. And that was proving to be the third most daunting front of all.

The other doctor had fled. But that was alright - there were no surveillance devices, and Charles observed that his only intent was escape - he was nervous about the IDF repercussions. 

Jairan and Yossi ran straight into the room rather than for the exit and began to attend Steven. This hippocratic distraction gave Max and his reluctant companion enough time to shut them up in the room, and then Charles watched as the intruder yanked the door handle, jamming the tumblers together with brute strength and effectively locking them inside. 

That left only Margot, and she was rooted to the floor, staring at Max with wide eyes, her brain a frenetic confusion of impulses to flee, basic self defense sequences, and the impending decision to scream as loud as she could. 

This third would spell her doom, he was sure. Max was ready for it, and he would break her neck if he had to. His hate for her profession, her uniform, her weakness, even what he deemed a "prey-like stance," radiated throughout the room hotter than any Tel Avivian noon so that Charles half-wondered if the non-psychic could feel it. 

It was toxic. And he couldn’t let her die. 

_Go to sleep!_ He pushed at her with all his will, so much so that it made him nauseous, as if he’d jogged two miles in the last three seconds - but it worked. Just as Max solidified the resolve to step forward and kill her, Margot collapsed where she stood in a faint, and did not stir again. 

"Let’s go," Charles said in the most commanding voice he could muster, resisting for the umpteenth time the urge to force his way inside the volatile man’s mind and make him docile…he wanted to. Desperately. But phantom pain ghosted along his throat and ribcage as he remembered the one and only time he’d tried with Kurt, and how he’d cried out louder than he ever had during a beating when his infiltration touched the ultraviolet evil of the other man’s consciousness. It had almost killed him. And Kurt, thrilled by the reaction, had only hurt him more severely. 

"Where are we going?" Max snapped, tone made hard by nervous tension and (the orderly had been right) Mossad-trained vigilance. 

Charles blocked his path to the exit and ran a hand through his own hair. "Listen to me. _Think,_ damn you. There’s no need to look so Johnny-on-the-spot; we’ve neutralized everyone who knows what you look like. In fact, if I were to hazard a guess, I believe we’ve taken care of everyone on the premises who knows for sure that there is an intruder at all."

Charles could see the skepticism forming on Max’s face, and so he quickly squashed all doubts before the man could form a complete thought. "Any interloper who came to observe the interview probably just thinks you’re an oral history contributer. I don’t see Mason or the other Coat contradicting this assumption. Besides, as you’ve probably guessed, I’m the only one they had today who can understand your language. The easiest way to do this, and our best chance of buying the most time, is to act as though we belong here."

He refrained from adding that he, in fact, _did_ belong there, and consoled his temper by reminding himself that one must pick one’s battles. 

Max frowned. "No one is going to buy that. I look like hell." 

Charles snorted, ignored his reservations, and stepped casually into the hallway. "Not if you were alone, no. Now come on." 

Five minutes later saw them secured in Charles’s rooms with the blinds shut, and all the telepath had had to do was make up some half-lie to a questioning nurse about a patient transfer. Max breathed an audible sigh of relief when he heard the metal chain scrape across the door jamb, and this struck Charles as rather...child-like, he supposed, to take solace in the safety of a locked door. Vulnerable. He found himself staring at the man's shoulder blades through thin cotton, wing-like and too-prominent with chronic hunger, making futile attempts to fly as Max tried to calm himself and stave off the bone-crushing exhaustion left in the wake of an adrenaline rush -

"Do you want a peanut-butter bar?" 

The wings stopped. Max turned around on his heel, and appraised the younger boy with a raised eyebrow. "Excuse me?"

Charles could feel his cheeks going warm, and then warmer still as his reflexive embarrassment gave way to annoyance. _What do I have to be embarrassed about? I'm only being nice._ "A peanut butter bar," he annunciated haughtily, and began rummaging in one of the crates below his bed. "You won't get very far if you're on the verge of collapse. I found them in the market - they're like a cross between granola and a cookie. Here."

He tossed one, and Max caught it without ever giving up the impromptu staring contest. When eventually he took his first bite, it wasn't long before it was gone, and Charles gave him another before indulging himself. Prisonering was hungry business. 

He could feel the gratitude half-formed in a cloud above the intruder's head, and half-expected a grudging word of it. Instead, Max threw the wrappers carelessly on the nearest surface (which turned out to be his overly full laundry bin), and combed his hair into place compulsively with his fingers. 

"Why are you doing this?"

"I don't really have a choice, do I? Here, wash your face. There's a bathroom just there -" 

He caught the towel too. In a hard-made fist with a grimace. "No you don't. I mean this - here. You're just a child. You should be in a school, or on a holiday. You look like you can afford it." 

Charles's smile was as bitter cold as the water that had begun to run. "Too smart for normal school," he said. "And this is my holiday. I want to help people. I want to learn to do Mason's job someday. Go to college, maybe. My stepfather is leery but he hates me and soon it might not matter, and my sister'd get to come too. I want to -"

He stopped when Max re-appeared, shirtless but taking care to cover the bare skin with the towel.

For once, they were thinking the same thing. 

/ _Talkative for a hostage./_

"Forget it. You're not actually interested. And it's not actually interesting -" 

"What about your mother?"

Charles blinked and leaned forward in spite of himself. They'd spoken at the same time. "Come again?"

Max pulled his dirty shirt back on. "What about your mother? She should be watching out for you. She's from one of those British islands, I'd bet, but she let you come halfway across the world without her. It doesn't seem right."

"Things aren't always what they seem." Charles returned stiffly. It was nice to know Max had no ESP to speak of, otherwise he'd catch that in this case, they were exactly as they appeared. "Go into my closet and pick one of my work coats. They're going to be much too small for you but we're going for disguise, not for comfort. Lose the suspenders, tuck that rag you're wearing into your trousers, and we'll be ready to go." 

"Do you know where she is?"

Charles nodded, unable to suppress a small, smug smile. "Didn't expect that, did you? One of the nice things about this place as compared to school, is that the teachers here tell me everything. She's in B Ward...." his gaze wandered to the breezeway through the narrow slats in his blinds; windowless and concrete, accessible no doubt through some kind of nondescript, close-by corridor. 

"And I think I know how to get there." 

 

This turned out to be easier said than done. 

"Ugh, damn it all-"

"You'd better stop swearing and start finding a place for us to move, boy." 

"Oh relax." Charles snapped. "This place runs like a military unit - everyone on this floor is on lunch now."

"How do you know?"

Charles huffed rather indelicately and paced back and forth again in front of the narrow door marked 'Fuses.' "Because I never go to lunch."

It didn't make sense. Mathematically, this was where the breezeway had to connect to. But the room was 2 feet by 2 feet and filled with nothing but circuits and overstocked shelves of bandages and cleaning supplies. He had to be missing something. He bent down and began squinting at the fuse box, searching desperately for some sort of secret button or lever. 

"It could be that there - Ow!" 

Charles yelped as Max dove inside the closet with him abruptly and shut the door, throwing them into pitch blackness. He was about to do more than that, sod their deal, but then the tall man pulled him up with firmness, rather than violence, covered his mouth with one hand, and held him as close as possible against his chest with one strong arm, crushing their bodies together. Between his grip and the shelving, it would be impossible to move without making noise, and soon Charles inferred that silence was Max's imperative. People had begun to pass by outside, and it would have been difficult, to say the least, to explain why a junior intern and his unfamiliar, ominous sidekick were mucking about with the electrics. 

The telepath tried to listen to what they were saying, to "gather intel" as his BBC thrillers put it, but he found it impossible to focus. Instead, it was as if he had become an entirely physical entity, hyper-sensitive to the pads of Max's fingers digging into his back, the lean muscle of his abs and thighs rubbing against the soft flesh of his own belly and unsteady legs-

The hand against his mouth wasn't warm...it was _hot,_ tight on his lips and vaguely damp with nervous sweat...he could practically feel the blood flow. He could feel-

_No._

"GET OFF ME!" Charles yelled into the hand, and struggled with all his might against Max's body-except that he was gripping, rather than pulling away, pushing and twisting, rather than say, turning around, and opening the door. No, not gripping, just using the other man for leverage. And it was a small space. He did not want to be discovered like this. Definitely _not._

Max swore and threw his hands up, then fumbled above his head for a moment until with a soft "click" the naked bulb above their heads came to life, and washed the room in a sickly yellow glow. Charles had his back to him now, and was frantically counting the sides of the red cross on a box of peroxide. 

"What the hell is wrong with you!" the intruder hissed. "I just saved your ass, you know. That was a horde of doctors wondering where the hell you'd all gone. I'm here for one thing, okay? And believe it or not it doesn't involve getting you fired, so why don't you stop mewling like someone's pampered cat and let's just get this done. Are you listening to me, Charles? Look at me!"

Max spun him around before Charles could react. And then all he could do was run the back of his hand across his rapidly filling eyes, and stare intently at the other man's shoes. 

Even now, his erection showed no signs of subsiding. 

"Don't," someone-him, he supposed, ground out the words against sand paper. "Please don't"- _Speak- Notice-Touch-Hit me-Laugh- **Tell.**_

Max's hand was on his jaw with that trademark deadly quickness, forcing his head up, his eyes up to meet his own eyes, narrow glaciers filled with...

A lot of things. Exasperation, (but no anger). Annoyance, (but no repulsion). Pity, which was a real head-spinner. And, maddest of all, absolutely no surprise. 

One beat. Two. Three. Then, "Look." And Max tipped his head up even higher so that Charles was forced to stare at the ceiling. At the drop-down attic door. 

"Can you reach the handle?" Charles asked stupidly, just for something to say. 

"Oh for fuck's sake," Max growled, and practically pulled the wood out of the paneling, revealing a skinny, vaguely unsound aluminum ladder leading up into a dimly lit shaft. "Go first. _Quietly._ "

He was quiet. They both were. Charles even held his breath in the vain hope that distilling all other senses would increase his ability to see in front of him. All he could see, were their shadows made grotesque and large on the tunnel sides, and then within the makeshift catwalk. All he could hear was the moaning. It got louder and louder as the passage became narrower, until single file became necessary and then a squeeze. He caught some words..."please" and "sky" and "water" and nonsense words, people talking about sheep's wool and begging release from the "overlords." On the surface, out of context...out of the dark, it would have been funny. But the effect in the here-and-now was so terrifying Charles came very near to giving into animal instinct and turning back. All that stopped him, was the fact that he would not have made it two feet. 

"Max...are you still there?" 

"Yeah…you see an end to this?"

"I think so…" Charles crouched down low and let his feet move with false trust along the steady decline. His eyes, at last adjusted to the murk, were beginning to discern a seam of grayish light a few meters ahead. "Another door, I think. Stay back while I feel around for a handle. I don’t trust this wood not to break under our weight." 

But it was more than that. The lurid soundtrack was right below them now, and his head was throbbing with interminable layers of psychic pain…a weight began to solidify in the pit of his stomach as he groped around the square patch of light for an orienting hinge, for there was no doubt that something horrible awaited them. Something that would make Max’s instinctual nerves look like a child’s tantrum.   
He had to stay one step ahead. 

"Got it!" he announced, and pulled what he hoped was a handle upward. After some embarrassingly difficult straining, it gave, and they both had to blink a few times before registering the rickety, banisterless staircase that lay before them. 

The smell, they caught instantly. Charles tasted peanut butter and stomach acid at the back of his throat and fought the battle of his life to keep it down. He gagged, then took deep breaths through his mouth and used his hand to cover his nose, desperately trying to get the unmistakable stench of human waste out of his pores and memory.

Max almost pushed him the ten or so feet straight to the ground. " _Move!_ We need to find out what the hell this is -"

"I’m going," Charles rasped, and took them two at a time, making himself look only at his feet until he’d hit solid ground.

Then he looked up and knew Hell. 

"Water!...Water…"

"Oi, shut the feck up before I get the ping pong paddles out again, you bleedin’ retard."

"What you don’t understand is that we’re on the edge of oblivion. Zion has fallen."

"She’s right. We are paying for our sins."

"I’LL MAKE YOU PAY TIL PAYIN FEELS LIKE SINNIN IF YOU DON’T SHUT UP!"

"Please…water…"

"Why so that you can piss it out again? We ain’t got no water til evening so just go back to your corner and leave the toilets for Rolf, he has the shits and I’m not cleaning it up a third time."

"Hahahahahahahha! HAHAHAHAHAHHA!"

"Where is Max? WHERE IS HE WHAT DID YOU DO WITH HIM? Tell me or my little ghost will eat your dreams. H-he will kill _your_ children…"

A room. 

Single, gray and concrete, with nothing but the pale white heat of the sun to see by via an incidental skylight. 

Ceiling spigots trickling rusty filth and foul with mold. Twenty-four wraiths with stuck-out bones in soiled white hospital clothes, some sitting in the various corners of filth, others wandering as if through the desert, lost in their small cage. A wall, marked with a sloppy perma-paint "B Ward," pock-marked with chains attached to restraints, lined with those who had gone completely, and knew only screaming violence. 

The cleanest people there were three huge orderlies who read nothing but contempt from their card table near the main entrance, staff Charles had never seen around before, and a quick scan of their minds told him why; convicts and service dodgers, liberated conditionally as long as they consented to be perdition’s gatekeepers. 

They were hunched in a poker game over a small mound of poor-man’s treasure; cigarettes, rubles, a watch with a leather band. They had yet to notice the interlopers on the clearly obsolete stairs. 

"Max…" Charles whispered when he could find his voice. The Jewish boy had frozen mid-step on the staircase, every muscle taught, eyes wide, nostrils flared as if in defiance of the odor. His mind read like a mushroom cloud. "Max, we still have the element of surprise. We need to think through this-"

"WHERE IS MY HUSBAND?"

The largest orderly straightened up and looked towards the source of the hysterical inquiry. Charles followed the line of sight to an emaciated girl with matted black hair, straining at her chains with all her might towards the card table so that blood ringed her wrists and dripped down her arms. Once, she might have been beautiful. Now, she called to mind the feral, terrible physicality of an alley cat, matted and wild with immediate need and rage. 

"Well guess it’s up to me to shut this cunt up before she throws her own shit at Akshi again, eh?"

A wiry man at the table grimaced and ran a tattooed hand through his beard. "Had to shower for half an hour. She does it again and I’m going to break her arm. You hear that, Maggie-Martha…whatever the fuck your name is? I’m going to spit in the little ghost’s face and then break your arm."

"Aw, no need for that," said the menacing first who was now within reach of the girl, and pulled back tobacco-stained teeth in something like a leer. "She’s just a twig. A few love taps’ll do her right into a long sleep, won’t they girl? Fuck, but I wish you wasn’t so dirty. I’d give you something to dream on."

"GoawayGOAWAY - _Max_ -"

"AHHHHHHHHHH!" 

Charles hit the ground hard, and saw stars when his nose made contact with the greasy stone floor. He tried not to think about the crack or the warmth down his face that followed. He didn’t have time…he could see Max get to the orderly through eyes bleared with pain just as the large man kicked the girl’s legs open and raised his hand to strike - he saw that man hit the wall, heard the dull thud of flesh on bone, bone on something more unyielding still…

Charles learned in the time he did not have how fragile a thing the skull was. Like melon, or the beads Raven made dream catchers with. 

The blood surrounded the boy and the girl like an island, and then the spigots blew, and rusty water gushed to the chorus of two dozen pitched fits of nonsensical sound, mixing with filth and brains, and the other two, they were coming, one for him, and the other for the feline thing and her protector-

"STOOOOPPP!" 

One shrill voice carried the tune of desperate chaos high for a moment –

His tendons strained -

 _His_ voice -  
His neon mind, shattered and blinded;  
Crashing down, out, open, through the Jericho of stealth and long past danger -  
Will.  
Mine.  
Time.  
Off.  
Stop.  
Stop.  
 _Stop._

Charles closed his mouth, and all was silence.

Hell had frozen solid. No one moved. No one spoke. (No one died).

Hell was stasis. 

Hell was his.

A word surfaced unbidden in his trance as he walked slowly towards the woman called Magda, and prepared with alien confidence to enter her mind. 

"Omega." 

And then Charles dove. 

Xxx xxx xxx

You would have been a Roma prince and played the violin. Is that why you haunt me, little child? I wanted you, we both did. Strong child, strong like your papa - not like me. No, I failed you, but your papa is strong like a hunter and smart like a thief. He learns the tongues of our enemies and finds the leaders of his extinct faith. 

What was that, Isak? Yes you're right, I'm worthless. My mama had eight children. She labored easy like a sow and was her own midwife, biting down on tree bark and adding silent lines to a high forehead. She was stern even before we saw light, frowning at us to come out. 

I begged you. I begged you to come out. You came out in pieces, Isak - why did you do that? Neither me or your papa are cruel...yet you have cruelty, coming out in bloody pieces to spite my small hips.

Is it because I did not save the others? The Herr Doktor would bring them, pale things with missing tongues or burns, always beyond me, beyond my stupid, clumsy hands - Answer me Isak, _answer me._ We are in all dark now, I have lost time again, drifted again, but no matter where I am or who is hurting me or how much Max pleads you are there in the corner of my eye, staring, taunting with your shivering would-be body and making me scramble for swaddling clothes-

You are naked and cold - but you would rather have died than need me. 

Is it because I married a Jew? Is it your father you don't like? You have to understand, Isak, he tries to be a good man. Even if the Nazis were right about me, little gutter-rat good only for death - he deserved to live. He has a warrior spirit. Leader spirit...he loves us, Isak. He wept for you and sat shiva for you even though he does not believe. He thinks I cannot see his hollow ritual. But he does it for us, Isak, did it so that I will not go mad, and so that you will grow up with a thing to believe in other than a slum and rocks thrown at your head when I take you to the market.

I believe the Nazis are wrong. For I loved him from the minute I saw him in school, when he was a normal boy like you would have been a little boy, and when he made love to me to make you he treated me like something sacred. No pain. Nothing forced. No fighting. I was his sacrament. 

He wants me to eat. He wants me to get better. "Stop Magda, quiet Magda, sleep Magda. We will come back from this. We will have another." 

But I can't. How can I eat when the only worthwhile thing I ever held inside me spurned me and poured itself out? He is not wrong. He is not perverse. Except in loving me. If you can't love me, Isak, why should he -

"I can't love you, Magda, because I am not here anymore. I would have, though. You can be sure of that, Little Mother."

Do....do you speak? 

"No, you are speaking. I am you. Isak is you. You're torturing yourself with guilt over this child. Oh Magda...you didn’t kill him. Auschwitz did."

Your words - they are excuses. Silly! Vile! Max came out himself. He dragged me to safety and found us a home and works in the quarries for us. He cooks and sings to me and haggles in the market - he does the work of two, covered in the ash of that place. There is no excuse...for what I am-

"Little Mother, you see Max with a woman's eyes. Close them now in the dark - pay no heed to the phantom child you see talking before you, and think about how you have always seen him. How you have been trained by that stern midwife to see all men – perfect, stable, able to do anything. And Max...even before the Nazis you knew he was made of different mettle besides. He was singled out because he stood up. He wooed you against all custom and propriety. He did not just survive the ghetto and Auschwitz, he _learned_ them. He learned how to get you out of them. 

"But you also know that all his heroism has its price. You remember his night terrors, and how he killed the quarry foreman because of a single heritage joke made in good humor. You helped him get rid of the body. It's under the goat pen. You look at the goat pen every day and wonder if you did not make a mistake with him. You didn't, Little Mother. Auschwitz killed that quarryman, not Max. Auschwitz mangled its forgotten children, and now it's doing its best to kill you with phantom dreams." 

What good is what you tell me? I liked you better when you only judged. His spells will not stop. He is better than me but broken. He…he makes me scared, sometimes. But what can I do? What can I do, but love him? And I will never...never have his babies-

"Yes you will. You're only seventeen. You remember what your mother told you. 'The body is like fruit. And fruit ripens slower than the gypsy boys think, Maggie.' She held the matchmakers back for all of your older sisters until they were at _least_ your age. Now imagine what she would have said to a malnourished girl who had seen horrors every day. It will take _time,_ Little Mother. Allowing yourself what you need to get strong does not make you weak. It makes you...tactical. Like your husband." 

How could I be the one for him? That hardened man… how could he really want...want to -

"Because you are Peace. Because you need him. Because you cherish everything he gives you, even if it's made of bottle caps and glass. Because you don't care that he can't play the fiddle; because you dance to his off-timed rhythms, and make a threadbare skirt look better than Judy Garland's ruby slippers. Magda, listen to me - listen to yourself. You are I and I am the core of your rationality. It doesn't matter why he loves you - only that he does, and that you must live to give yourselves a future."

I want...I want to give him twins. But Isak will never let me. He will follow me like shadow and chimney smoke...he will hate me forever, like Max has begun to hate me he -

"Shhhh. Little mother, open your eyes now. Open them."

I have. I see. I see my baby boy's face....I see the face changing into...into no face at all. No...Isak, no, _don't leave_...

"He is already gone, Magda. But the twins, they will not be smoke. They will be flesh and blood, pink cheeks and curly black hair. The smoke must clear to make way for your family. And Magda...you are right to think that Max needs them. He needs you too, make no mistake...otherwise the goat pen will not be the last of it."

No - _no_ more killing, please…and he stares into the fire, some nights, playing with that coin. 

_ThedoctorruinedhimandoncoinnightsIcan’t…_

I -

I want to let go. I want Isak to forgive me.

"He's gone. Look at the air. Put your hand through it. See? He is your conjured torment. He is a mirror. Make the mirror look like you again. Think of yourself as you once were...as you hope to be."

I don't hope. I want. I want -

i want my eyes to have color and to wear red lipstick and to feel pretty in the hoop earrings max made me…

silver, real silver, even though we have no money…

i don't want to feel like a corn maze mask anymore i want my hips to rub together when I walk again and i want to stop hurting i hurt all the time stabbing pain throughout my body like my bones are tired of being connected i want to make borscht and go to the campfires in our little village i want to hold his hand and drink communal wine...

i want to soften him i want to get down on my knees and be the soft one for him i want him to undress me and make me forget that we are two all-wrong people...

i want to be one whole person with him and i want to...

 _I want_ , and I will, I will give him children. It is what...

It is all I have wanted. They can't take that. They can't take that... 

"No, they can't. They took Isak, but you have the power to stop them."

...I do?

"Yes. Look at the smoke. Look...your twins are here. They are strong, thick dreams, cumulous cloud children. Almost solid. And Max will be such a father to them. You know this, though...he will pour all his soul into them like he does for you now, and Magda if you let yourself be happy...if you let him love you and eat and sleep cradled with him and your hopes about these children, he will not have his spells anymore. Max's impulse to murder will be what dies, and nothing else."

...I _have_ hoped…

And I have hoped that. Hoped for that. 

I _want_ that.

"Of course you have. You know him. You know that he loves until he is beyond recognition. Love will sustain you, and move you on with your lives. Magda...who is Isak?"

Isak is...

Isak is...gone. 

"And who are you?"

Nobody special – 

"No. _No._ Again. Try again."

I am....I am a survivor. 

"What do you want?"

I want life. 

"What do you want?"

I want Max…the old Max. 

"What do you want?"

I want to have more babies. 

"Where is Isak?"

Gone. He's not...he's not in the smoke anymore. 

_I think maybe he's in heaven._

"He is. Of course he is. And where are you?"

I am in a dark place...

"Not for long. Where do you wish to be?"

In my husband's arms. 

"And how can you get there?"

I can...live. I can choose to live. I can...

 _God I'm hungry!_

"Are you ready?"

I'm ready for something...I don't know, I don't know what I'm ready for, but it's different it will be different -

"Magda."

 _I am Magda._

"Magda."

 _Yes._

"Magda, I want you to wake up."

 _I want to wake up._

"Wake up, Magda."

Yes...yes...I have to...so much to do. So much to do! Let me out!


	4. Chapter 4

Getting out of B Ward and to the outer gates was easier than Charles had anticipated. Partly because he'd actually put the entire _block_ in stasis. He knew he should be dumbfounded, and maybe a little scared, by the exponential growth of his powers. In truth however, it didn't even feel like an effort anymore. It was like he had discovered another limb, one that had quickly become reified and indispensable. He took Max and Magda by the hands and led them in their docile trances past doctors, nurses, patients, and people behind glass windows with authority, until all that was left was the iron perimeter. 

Then he woke them up (just them, which was easy, all he had to do was focus), and let the shock run its course. 

"Where are we!" Max was screaming in his face. "Magda...is that - _Magda._ "

The girl looked at him - not through him, Charles noted with some elation, but _at_ him, and nodded. "Y-yes, my love. It's me." 

Max looked like he didn't know whether to go to her or interrogate Charles. In the end, he pulled Magda into a vice-grip embrace and buried his face in her neck for a few seconds. She did not resist, even though Charles felt her projected anxiety at being so dirty and unattractive at that moment. He couldn't understand the little things they whispered to each other, almost too low to hear, but he didn't have to...he didn't want to...the whole scene was too intimate, and it was playing havoc with his mind. He almost walked away - but then Max broke the hug, and yanked him back by the sleeve. 

"Where are we? How did we get out? I'm...it's weird, I don't remember past that orderly-"

"He knocked you out." Charles lied quickly. "Then a couple of patients restrained the other two. Turns out the door to B ward leads right into a back alley and I memorized the lay out when I came here. Barely passed anyone." He thrust his key card at them before Max could work out just how implausible this all was. "Here. We're alone for the moment...go. Get as far away as you can. If you need money or help find a kibbutz in one of the rural areas. Mason says they don't take much notice of the cities' comings and goings and probably won’t heed any broadcasts declaring you wanted. "

Max looked down at the card, then back at him, and frowned. His mind told Charles that he wanted to say something...was desperate to find the right words...but Magda shattered his train of thought. 

"He's right, this boy. We have to go. I'm better now. Or...I will be. I'm fine. This hospital...it is a bad place and we must leave. Please Max, let’s go home - now!"

Hearing her voice, coherent and almost commanding, had a devastating effect on Max's resolve. His mind flooded with such relief and tenderness that Charles nearly winced. Good memories, of school, of music and their home in Poland, flickered across his consciousness like the Nuremburg tapes, the thin remembrances of an eager but only cautiously hopeful soul. 

The impulse to speak, however, still reigned. 

"What about you?" the Jewish boy said, and Charles swallowed the heaviness in his throat, forcing a smile. 

"Don't you worry about me. This will all work itself out. I'm a child and a hostage, remember? Not responsible. Now please...hurry. Go."

Their eyes stayed locked for what felt like a very long time. Charles should have read his mind, _really_ read his mind - _as a memento -_ but he was too busy governing the expression on his face, and keeping crazy ideas like that in check. When Max finally blinked, nodded curtly, and put a companionable hand on his shoulder, it was one of the most welcome and regretted instances of the telepath's life. 

"Goodbye."

"...Take care."

He traced them as far as Rothschild Avenue. 

Then he let the world go, and collapsed, bereft and ruined in the sand. 

When the IDF soldiers found him, he got on the ground and put his hands on his head like they told him to. But that didn't stop them from knocking him out with the butt end of their guns. 

 

_**Later that evening...** _

Mason looked down at the ankle bracelet, heavy, blinking, too-tight plastic rubbing up against his flesh, and almost didn't enter the infirmary. How had it come to this? In just a few short weeks, everything he had worked for had been ruined. He would probably be stripped of his license, his hospital torn down, half his fortune wasted...and then what would become of his patients? Would it be like America, where they just opened the doors and wished them luck? Would the orderlies empty the drug stores like Christmas had come early? 

_/All because of him-/_

No. No, he mustn't think that way. He had to be the adult here. Had to be civil, and sane. Had to -

Mason squared his shoulders, wincing a bit as the lump on his head throbbed with the abrupt movement against the bandage, and walked through the door. 

Charles was on the bed nearest him, sleeping still and sound on his back to accommodate the broken nose. Indeed, after the IDF had discovered what had happened, all the patients had been evacuated to God knew where, and so the large room was dark save for the single reading light above Charles's bed. _The Picture of Dorian Grey_ lay opened on his lap, creased and dog-eared...and Mason had a moment of revulsion, jagged like an ill-used razor. 

"There's something wrong about you." He said to the sleeping boy. "I haven't been at ease for a moment since you came here, from that day to this. I-"

"You have your secrets, Doctor. And I have mine." 

Mason started as Charles's eyes opened abruptly - awake then. Pretending. Always pretending. He sat up now, thin shoulders almost liberated from the paper gown, and fixed him with that unsettling blue stare. 

"Ease is elusive when there's always so much to hide." 

His voice was cold and even. It made him angry. He could have dealt with tears, apologies, begging, questions - anything but this. This remorseless and cool demeanor, tinged just this side of righteous...he could feel the veins in his temples filling with blood. 

"I wasn't HIDING anything, you daft boy!" he shouted. "I told you about B ward. It's standard triage, to concentrate your best resources on the patients with the best chance of recovery!"

Charles made a sound with the back of his tongue that sounded very much like scorn, and began yanking the saline tube out of his wrist. "Yes, those essential and hard-to-allocate resources. Like bathrooms and light. Well done, Doctor. Very judicious." 

Even now, the hippocratic oath held sway over his fury. "You shouldn't do that - with the tubes. You had quite a few falls and the nurse told me you were dehydrated, and your nose...stay still, otherwise -"

"Otherwise WHAT?" Charles was yelling now, this child who had been afraid to come out from behind a curtain in his own house. He continued to free himself from hospital machinery and tore open the bag with his clothes at the end of the bed. "Otherwise I'll be ugly? Good. I don't care. I hope I'm disfigured. Maybe then - tch. Absurd. You're absurd, and maybe that triage song helps you sleep at night, but I can tell you what I'd prefer, if I were they." 

Mason glared. "Is that why you gave the Jewish boy your key card?"

Charles tensed for a split second. Had he not spent the better part of a decade observing physical tells, he would've missed it. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You do. There are more cameras in this facility than you think."

"I was a hostage -"

"You were an _accomplice!"_ Mason roared. "I listened to the _tape,_ Charles! While I was sitting, waiting for my house arrest verdict in that damned interrogation room, I heard everything. Maybe my textbook German isn't up to your standards but I know the word "willing" when I hear it! You took him all the way to the annex! And don't you _dare_ tell _me_ there weren't opportunities to escape -"

"Yes. There were." Charles snapped. He'd dressed by now, in his uniform of corduroy and cardigan and loafers. "I let them pass. Because he didn't deserve to be there, and we had _no business,_ Doctor, consigning his wife to that hell hole before we'd even run an axis on her. You think you're God, do you know that? You console yourself with structural arguments, tell yourself you're helping, but I read your "manual." It's a new field, this, and you're no more equipped to deal out life-altering judgment than I am!" 

"OH BUT I AM." Mason hit the wall with the side of his fist....he couldn't remember the last time he'd been truly afraid for his own control like he was now. "You were barely out of diapers during our last war, boy, but let me tell you, I've seen diseases of the mind you can't even fathom. I've treated shell shock without knowing the word for it. I've watched men forget their families, bit by bit, forget everything but the pain...I've seen horrors, and sometimes, in the middle of a nightmare, you _have_ to make choices. Max and Magda are dangerous. I don't need to be a doctor to see that. Any idiot can see that."

"Then I am dangerous, too," said Charles, unfazed. He walked towards him, slow and deliberate, half an eye, flickered dark with fear, on the still-raised fist. "If that's all we are...what our stimuli teaches us to be, then I too will grow up to be a violent man and a rapist." 

Now it was Mason's turn to falter, seized by revulsion for another party. "My God, Charles -" he whispered.

"Oh please," he bit out. "Just _don't._ You knew. It's why you brought me here, don't think I don't know. Raven was right...I don't think you bargained for a colleague, and who can blame you. It made no difference to me. I was free...I was _fine._ But make no mistake, Doctor..." 

Mason was fixed like a pinned sample, by that egregious gaze. "If someone were to force me into a familiar feeling corner, as you did with Max...I would become your fathomed monster. Those two...there is hope for them. There is a chance, especially now...they love each other, and your war is over. They will find their peace, and put their demons to bed." 

Charles turned from him then, and for some time there was nothing but the sound of the EKG machine, whirring and neglected. Mason put his head in his hands. "None of this matters now, at any rate." He muttered. "It's all over...all my work...and you - there's nothing for it. You have to go back. Your age was the only thing that protected you from arrest as well, that and the ambiguity of your duress...You'll go back there to the Markos, you idiot child, and what's to become of the rest of my charges? Hm? Did you consider all that?" 

Mason wasn't sure what he'd anticipated in answer...but it wasn't laughter. And yet Charles was laughing, low in his throat, bleak and humorless. "I've thought on that quite a bit, as it happens." 

And then the boy turned around, and put his hand to his temple, and Mason lost himself. 

"I'm not going back, Doctor. You must know that isn't an option."

"No..."

"I'm staying right here, and finishing out the summer. Your investigatory hearing with the Knesset is tomorrow, and I'll attend, and this will all go away."

"It...will?"

"Yes, Steven. Because the Israeli government, for all its rhetoric, is at as much of a loss with these poor souls as you are. They will forget there ever was a Sholem Hospital, and it will be your domain once more. You're arrogant, Steven...and you're dead wrong, but you're not a cruel man. You'll run this place again. Which is of course to say, I will run this place. And when I leave, you will remember what I did, and you will continue, do you understand?"

Mason smiled placidly...but something tugged at the edge of the mist. Something big and important. "Yes that's fine. But where will you go?"

Charles didn't even hesitate before answering. "I'm taking my sister, and I'm going to Oxford. And I'll stay there as long as it takes for the world to recognize, without manipulation, that I'm a match for it. Now go and get some sleep. We have a long day ahead of us."

"Yes...you're quite right. Goodnight, Charles."

"Goodbye." 

 

_**Epilogue  
CIA Base, Langley Virginia: Tuesday, June 2nd, 1962-3:25am ** _

_"What do you know about me?"_

_"Everything."_

I wonder if he knows how true that is. 

It's past 3. I should be sleeping. Moira was a dead end, which is just as well - she deserves better than my mechanical hands, my distracted expression - what did Sally say back at school? "You shag like you're solving a rubics cube."

And don't I know it. 

I did accept one of her cigarettes. I threw my paperweight at the smoke detector in this suffocating military barracks and am smoking it now, staring out the window at the ever-so-riveting shrubbery and manicured lawn. 

I feel like I'm going crazy. 

Why is he _here_?

...Why did I follow him? Wait for him. Plead with him.

Someone's knocking. Probably Raven again. I almost don't answer, even though the thought signature outside reads acute agitation. But she needs me. Her need is my purpose, some days. 

"Come in, darling, what's wrong?"

The door creaks slowly open, then shuts...and he's standing in my room, the tall silhouette and leather jacket unmistakable even in the dim moonlight and the ember of ash.

"Is that a new tack you're trying?" He attempts to tease me, but there's too much edge in his voice. I have a sudden impulse to run across the floor and grab his turtleneck, (I wonder if I could, or if he'd end me first...perhaps it fits too tightly across his chest?) – so instead I turn back towards the window, and crunch myself in farther against the pane. 

"Oh. Hello -" _Max._ "Erik," I edit myself just in time. "I thought you were -"

"The girl. Your sister." he truncates, and continues towards me until he fills up the opposite side of the glass. He looks enviously at my fag, but doesn't quite get up the casual courage to ask me for one. Instead, he rests his hands...long-fingered things, against the sill, and is silent for a long moment. 

I wait. I plan to wait all night if that's what it takes. Don't ask me why this is a priority. I don't know. Finally I open my mouth to excuse myself for a moment, (to seek out the loo, get some air, anything. I need a break...he's too close, this ghost of summer's past - he's not close enough). 

"Are you staying?"

Quiet words. My words. I almost wince. I sound like a -

The hand closest to me shifts, quick and neat across the metal, and a visible shudder wracks me at the sight. 

I'm still not good with sudden movements. With men and their goddamned hands. 

He notices my agitation, and to my surprise, stops short of touching me...stops a mere inch away from my face. His fingers ghost along the line of my jaw and my neck and my lips, brushing, never quite touching...stop...what are you doing? With your reverent fingers and your narrow gray eyes, all-telling and all-knowing...I'm not breathing, did you know that? You've found me. You've trapped me.

"I am." he says. "I'm staying this time."

I let out the stale air in my lungs with a strained gasp.

I lean my cheek into the hand, which stays still, cradling and patient. It still hurts...the shock of it. The shock of this man's flesh against my flesh, warm, no, _hot,_ beckoning and pregnant with dangerous nostalgia. 

" _Max_..."

"That's not my name anymore." But it's gentle. 

I am being held. Christ...I have never been held. Pathetic, that. I should've made that a point, somewhere down the line...maybe then I wouldn't be so powerless now...in his arms. 

"I'm sorry." I say into the turtleneck. It's tight, as I thought, but yielding to my grip. Soft. "The fire, and your little girl...and Magda never did recover, did she? I should've h-helped you...I should've..."

I am hysterical now...I don't care. I saw the fruits of my failure ooze through the gaping wounds of his mind, and it's raw. For him, it's been raw for thirteen years. 

He's stroking my hair.

There were days...many days, in the past, where I would close my eyes tight and turn the lights inside off and pretend that I was dead. My machinations never included Paradise. 

I'm there now. Paradise is the smell of leather and his forearms and forgiveness. 

I feel like an intruder. 

"Charles..." he takes his time along my name. He can't quite bring himself to say 'it's all right.' I think those words mean something different to him, anyway, something more personal than mere reassurance. What he says instead, is - 

"What happened -- happened. And there are a lot of people to blame. People I intend to find. But I have no quarrel with you."

He takes a step back, separating us, and then my chin is in his hand, exactly as it was all that time before. "How can you not know..." he murmurs, and uses his thumb to wipe away an errant tear. 

"Know...what?"

He closes the distance then, and this time, I don't move an inch. His mouth is on my mouth, sweet and chapped and careful, so careful, as if he were asking permission with the action. My jaw goes slack. I let him in. I moan, a sad, desperate, keening sound, and pull him closer, down, around me -

Yes.

This.

Please. 

Erik. 

_"You're a god,"_ he thinks, as he lifts me with ease. 

_"You're my match,"_ he thinks, as he fits against me. 

_"You were the one - you are a mutant - more-yes-telepath-Charles-Charles- **mine**." _

"I could be," I say against his ear, eyes clamped shut, waiting for the nausea and the fear that doesn't come, amazed at myself when I mean the words...even when he starts to strip me.

"Open your eyes."

I do. 

"I could be."

END


End file.
